It’s been a little harder than expected for the Interior Department to find a permanent head of its new offshore drilling safety agency.

“There have been a lot of efforts for quite a while to find a new director,” Michael Bromwich, director of the departments Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, said Tuesday at an event hosted by Platts Energy Podium. “But it’s been harder and it’s taken longer … than we anticipated.”

Bromwich — who has agreed to stay on as temporary head of the new Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement until a permanent replacement is in place — said the challenge includes finding someone who can handle the spotlight and scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

“He or she will find themselves in the middle of very important and controversial issues,” Bromwich said.

Along with the need to find a candidate with the right technical skills and background without appearing to be a “yes person” to the demands of industry, the new director also needs to be able to “stand up to the political heat,” he added.

While there have been a couple of promising candidates, they backed out “precisely because they didn’t want to be in the crucible of politics,” Bromwich said.

One BOEMRE official added that one of the candidates backed out after Bromwich’s appearance last Thursday at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing.

The hearing did not seem unusually combative for Bromwich — who has faced significant heat from Republicans and oil-state Democrats over the pace of drilling permits since last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Bromwich — as the nation’s leading offshore drilling enforcer — has largely been the Obama administration’s point man on reorganizing the former Minerals Management Service into three distinct agencies, issuing ramped up post-spill safety and environmental operations and defending the pace of issuing permits.

The protracted search has also stalled Bromwich’s post-agency career. “It is no secret in Interior that my original plan was to leave once the reorganization was complete as of Oct. 1,” he said.

At the same time, “I don’t feel comfortable leaving the agency in just anybody’s hands. It’s gotta be somebody who I feel confident can carry on the job that we started,” Bromwich said. “And so we’ve been looking hard for the last several months. We will continue to look hard, very hard, in the next few weeks.”

In his last pen and pad with reporters before BOEMRE officially becomes three distinct agencies Oct. 1, Bromwich again defended the current status of pending permits.

“We are in a very different place … and a much better place than I think people would have predicted” as recently as last spring, he said.

The lasting effects of the administration’s moratorium and subsequent slowdown of drilling permits since the spill has been a focal point of Republicans, oil-state Democrats and other critics.

According to a recent report from investment bank FBR Capital Markets, 20 deep-water drilling rigs would leave the gulf if U.S. regulators do not accelerate permitting. The analysts blamed BOEMRE’s pace on higher safety standards, not politics.

But the backlog for shallow-water permits “has remained quite small,” Bromwich said Tuesday. There are 15 permits pending, with nine returned to the company for more information, he said. For deep-water drilling projects requiring sub-sea containment — an issue in last year’s BP spill — the agency has permitted 40 unique wells, though he acknowledged that, as far as permits that are pending, “we’re above 20 for the first time in quite a while … and we’re concerned a little bit about the backlog.”

The agency is prepping for the first lease sale since the spill in the Western Gulf in December, a sale in the Central Gulf in late spring and reviewing proposals to drill in the Arctic next summer.

Citing ongoing talks with Mexico, BOEMRE said Tuesday that it would delay processing bids on 166 out of about 3,900 blocks being offered in that Western Gulf lease sale. All blocks will still be available for sale, but the bureau will hold the bids on the 166 blocks that are close to the U.S.-Mexico border until the two nations reach an agreement on safe oil and gas development — or June 14 — whichever is earlier.